Farewell to Kumar Pallana, the yoga teacher who became a movie star

[Editor’s note:This item has been updated since it was originally posted.]

“Each of us has our own destiny,” Kumar Pallana told The Dallas Morning News in 2004. “Mine is to be an actor.”

And he was an actor — on and off, mostly off — for decades, dating to the 1950s and stretching into the present day. He was in Westerns in the ’50s, on Captain Kangaroo in the 1960s, but is best known as the scene-stealer in the movies of Wes Anderson, starting with the first, 1996′s Bottle Rocket, which was set and shot in Dallas, Pallana’s adopted home for decades.

“I came to the United States in 1946,” said the actor, who began his career in India as a juggler and singer. “Back then, Indians couldn’t even get one foot in the door at the studios. There just weren’t that many roles for Indians.

“Oh sure, I got work — but I played a different sort of Indian,” he said with a chuckle. In the 1950s, Mr. Pallana was cast in such films as Broken Arrow, with Jimmy Stewart, and Viva Zapata, with Marlon Brando.

Things are different these days. “Now Indians can actually play Indians in American films,” he said.

Mr. Pallana was born in India in 1918. His father was a car salesman.

In Bottle Rocket, he played Kumar, the out-of-sorts safecracker who couldn’t crack safes — a far cry from his real life practicing yoga from a second-floor perch at the Cosmic Cup on Oak Lawn Avenue. “Spiritual books, specialty books, religion and the Kabala — nobody knows in Texas — cowboy country!” he told The Believer. “And nobody knows what the yoga and yogurt are.”

“He was a sweet guy,” says Bob Musgrave, who played potential getaway driver Bob Mapplethorpe in Bottle Rocket. We spoke Thursday night, shortly after he’d gotten the news. “And he was perfectly cast. The guy was one of the most naturally animated actors you could put in a movie. And if you changed his wardrobe, you got a totally different shade of Kumar.”

“Just a great guy [who] had a great life and was performing right till the very end,” Owen Wilson said Thursday night on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live. “We’re gonna miss him a lot.”

In Rushmore he was Mr. Littlejeans, with the best delivery ever, man. In The Royal Tenenbaums, he played put-upon Pagoda, sidekick to Gene Hackman’s misery-making Royal. Then came the movies without Wes, among them The Terminal by Steven Spielberg, in which he brought a little magic to a first date between Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Others were still in the works, as was a USA Film Festival tribute Nov. 7 at the Texas Theatre that will now become something of a memorial.

“As we were going to press with this program, the news of Kumar Pallana’s passing reached us. Yet again, he steals the show,” says Ann Alexander, the fest’s managing director, in a release sent early Friday morning. “Although Kumar will not be with us in the physical world for this program, we know that his spirit joins us as his many friends and fans celebrate his screen debut performance and a man who enriched the lives of so many.”

Dallas native Matt Zoller Seitz, author of the just-released The Wes Anderson Collection, will attend the event at the Texas. The fest also plans to screen Bottle Rocket – both the original short film that debuted at the USA Film Festival, and the feature that followed. Alexander says there will also be a tribute reel featuring Pallana.

Yoga enthusiast achieves unlikely on-screen success
By ESTHER WU
September 2, 2004
(This story originally appeared in Metro.)

Kumar Pallana arrives at the yoga studio wearing sneakers and a ski jacket — despite the scorching 98-degree heat outside. In Hollywood style, he is fashionably late and offers no explanation. He plops down in a director’s chair and without any fanfare begins to tell his life story.

At 86 years old, Mr. Pallana is an unlikely movie star. You can find his name rolling off the credits of such films as The Royal Tenenbaums, Bomb the System, Duplex, and most recently, The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks. His next film, Romance & Cigarettes, is scheduled to open in 2005.

Quite a coup when you consider there are very few South Asians who have become successful in mainstream American films. And even fewer who have had the staying power of Mr. Pallana.

“I came to the United States in 1946,” said the actor, who began his career in India as a juggler and singer. “Back then, Indians couldn’t even get one foot in the door at the studios. There just weren’t that many roles for Indians.

“Oh sure, I got work — but I played a different sort of Indian,” he said with a chuckle. In the 1950s, Mr. Pallana was cast in such films as Broken Arrow, with Jimmy Stewart, and Viva Zapata, withbMarlon Brando.

Things are different these days. “Now Indians can actually play Indians in American films,” he said.

Mr. Pallana was born in India in 1918. His father was a car salesman.

“We enjoyed a comfortable life,” said Mr. Pallana. “My parents wanted me to go to school and become a professional – they were not very supportive of having an actor in the family.”

But the family lost its fortune and social status during India’s struggle for independence from Great Britain.

“So my parents had little say over my choice of careers.”

Mr. Pallana trained as a gymnast and later as a juggler and began to study yoga.

Once in America, the actor found work on television shows like The Pinky Lee Show and Captain Kangaroo.

Between acting jobs, Mr. Pallana supported his wife and two children by working on the nightclub circuit as a juggler.

However, his wife grew weary of the travel, and the family settled in Dallas in the 1960s.

Here, he purchased a building on Oak Lawn Avenue where he opened a yoga studio and where his son, Dipak, would later open a cafe on the ground floor called the Cosmic Cup.

The Cosmic Cup became well-known for its eclectic clientele.

“The Cosmic Cup became a place where you could nourish the soul as well as the body,” Mr. Pallana said.

Dipak started a chess night and jazz nights for patrons.

“We held one of the first drum circles in town. Soon after we added poetry readings and performance art. I’d teach yoga between. It was like a big community — one big family.”

The Cosmic Cup would become a gathering spot for area musicians, artists and actors — including Jeff Farrell.

“He’s like my family,” said the local actor and owner of the Little Yoga Studio in Dallas, where Mr. Pallana recently came to conduct a yoga breathing class.

Mr. Farrell is just one of the original Cosmic Cup regulars who has stayed in touch with Mr. Pallana.

Two others are Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson, who cast the actor in their first film, Bottle Rocket, and later in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. Those appearances revitalized Mr. Pallana’s acting career.

But on this day, the actor said he was not here to talk about films. “I am here to talk about yoga,” he told the small group waiting patiently for class to start.

“We begin with breathing. The key is repetition — if you do anything enough times, it becomes part of your nature. So we begin. Inhale and count to 20, then exhale and count to 20 …”

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